THE decision by Chancellor Gordon Brown to increase duty on petrol and diesel by 1.28p per litre from next month can be neither justified nor understood.

THE decision by Chancellor Gordon Brown to increase duty on petrol and diesel by 1.28p per litre from next month can be neither justified nor understood. Opec is cutting production by 3.5pc which may well lead to an increase in the price of crude, and the political situation in the Middle East is anything but stable.

The rise, another gratuitous swipe at motorists, will mean the average motorist contributing about &#xA3;30 a-year more to the exchequer and receiving precisely nothing back.

This at a time when many of the nation's overcrowded roads are still in a disgraceful state, rural public transport services and rail services in retreat or unreliable, and UK exporters desperate to compete on an equal footing with their European counterparts.

If the extra tax were to be used to ameliorate this state of affairs then there might be some value in it. In fact, heavier taxes will not dissuade people from using cars because they have very few alternatives, and will almost certainly be squandered on anything but an integrated transport policy.

The chancellor, however, faces a black hole in the country's finances and needs to borrow countless billions to continue funding improvements in public services which to date have little to show for his largesse.

He must be regretting having been forced by the protests of 2000 to abandon the odious fuel-price escalator he took on from the Tories - a move estimated to have cost &#xA3;1.8bn in lost revenue.

But motorists are Britain's milch-cow, never mind the inflationary effects of the increase at the pumps. Having been given a brief reprieve it's time to milk them once again.

WITH the Hutton Inquiry's evidence gathering completed, it seems clear that the BBC claim that the Iraq dossier was adapted to make the argument for war more persuasive, was, in essence, correct, and that Downing Street had a larger role to play in its production than it cared to admit.

What is of most concern though is the realisation that we knew absolutely nothing of Iraq's capabilities prior to committing our troops there.

This and the fact the Britain's "intelligence" supremo was apparently happy to tamper with the report at No 10's behest without any of the main players understanding what some of the key phrases actually meant, makes one wonder whether James Bond has been permanently replaced by Johnny English.